you have to be a little bit crazy to survive

Entries tagged with room

I was having trouble with a lot of crappy dreams in a row, and at one point I was in a building that had empty rooms and long hallways. The room I was standing in had a door near one corner (where I was standing), and another door on the exact opposite side of the room. The door I was beside led into a long hallway that might have had some doorways along it (I forget now), and half-way down had another hallway that branched off to the left. The walls were all a dingy white, possibly with some stains in places, and the floor and ceiling was white too. There was someone else with me, but I don't remember who.

I realized for just a moment that I was dreaming, and I thought, "I want Pyramid Head to be in this dream!"

Then I heard the loud, scary siren that heralds the arrival of Pyramid Head (from the Silent Hill games/movies/mythos), and it sounded twice. I looked down at the end of that long hall... and saw him standing there. Suddenly I completely forgot that I was dreaming, and also decided that Pyramid Head being there was a really, really bad thing.

So, I and my mystery-buddy ran across the room to the other door, which led outside. It was dark, and there was a large open grassy area bordered by a high chain-link fence with barbed wire curled across the top. We ran for the fence and apparently had superpowers, enough to jump the whole thing in one leap and keep going.

I looked back to see Pyramid Head tearing across the yard after me, and gaining in speed. He would reach my friend first, but surely that wouldn't stop him for long. For some reason, Pyramid Head was half his normal size and also missing his sword, but was just as terrifying. I kept running in mindless fear...

(This is apparently what happens after I spend 3+ hours on Skype talking to someone I met via Cry's video game livestreams, before going to bed. That someone would be Hiro, who you will be seeing here shortly. O.o )

I was playing some kind of coop multiplayer Amnesia-like game with Hiro via both the game client and chatting with Skype, except that instead of normal Amnesia: The Dark Descent with its medieval castle interior, the concept was to run around a modern day mental hospital plagued with monsters (the zombie ones from the Amnesia game) and avoid being caught by them or the regular staff while looking for books. Hiro's character was an Asian boy in his early teens and I was a girl with long-ish blonde hair; I think I'd gone with Alice for my character's name.

The building's layout was bizarre for an actual hospital. Hallways were ridiculously skinny, had maze-like branches all over the place and interconnected rooms, and you couldn't do anything about the lights that were always on. Everything was painted white, so there was no real chance of hiding anywhere in the open. Not only would the monsters cause you to pass out if they caught you, but doctors and nurses also wandered the hall and any of them including the monsters catching you meant waking back up in your room. I can't remember if the rooms were locked by default, I just remember it being so much backtracking that you didn't want to get caught, plus there was a feeling of impending doom like something bad was going to happen if you couldn't escape the place in time.

The point of the books was that they somehow unlocked doors. The books were hardcover, red, and had gold filigree designs on the covers that were all the same. If I remember right, they all had a four digit number on the first page while the rest of the pages were blank, which had to do with how they opened the doors. Some books were fakes and only the right ones would actually open a door at all, and only the door they were meant to. The books could be found in closets or refrigerators that were otherwise empty of anything else, and if you had one that worked with you when you opened the right door, the door would just automatically unlock itself.

I remember being in a small room that had a fridge and two closets, and Hiro took a book out of the fridge while I grabbed one from a closet. At this point it was becoming real as opposed to a video game, although I still had some odd fuzzy concept of an inventory system so that I wasn't literally carrying the books around (I had several by now), they just vanished but I still "had them." I remember hearing a monster grumbling out in the hall right at that moment. The hall went around the room outside past two different doors on opposite ends. Hiro told me to go one way and he'd go the other and distract the monster.

I didn't like this idea but he was already out the one door so I ran through the other. I realized somehow that he'd been caught by the staff and I kept running, as for some reason they were assuming Hiro was the only patient not in his room. He'd bought me some time, but now I had to figure out how to put it to good use and if I stayed in the halls I still ran the risk of getting caught at random. I found a nurse's bathroom and hid under the sink. The idea was to burn some time so the staff would get complacent and maybe enough would go to sleep after-hours so I could finally escape.

Logic really started falling apart at this point (apparently if you stay in one place in a dream for too long, small constant changes start building up into ridiculousness). What started as a long counter with sinks in it and one big cupboard area underneath with several doors (my hiding spot was as far into the corner opposite the entry door by the far end of the sinks as possible), slowly turned into just a counter without the cupboard underneath, and then finally the counter had some kind of tablecloth which hid me better. I remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure I was as squeezed into the corner as it got, and that the white dress I was wearing was staying hidden with me instead of flared out partly so it was visible from beyond the counter.

This whole time I was dreading that someone would actually come into the bathroom, and yes, eventually a nurse and a nurse's assistant walked in, both women. For some reason, they had a bunch of dirty dishes on a two-tiered rolling metal cart. The assistant started shoving dishes under the counter and it was obvious she could see me, but I sat there and thought "You can't see me, you can't see me," over and over. At this point I vaguely understood that I was in a dream and that logic had broken enough she shouldn't have seen me right off the bat.

She didn't say anything to her superior who was blathering on about various gossip and directions for the next shift or something, and I realized it wasn't because I was desperately trying to insist in my head that she couldn't see me. The assistant wasn't evil, and knew this place was way more than just some honest asylum. She kept glancing at me but only crammed more dishes under the counter (I could hardly move for all the dishes). Suddenly the nurse in charge started saying really crazy things, like she was hallucinating and what she saw was no longer what anyone else in the room saw. The nurse stood still and started staring off at nothing as what she was saying rambled to a halt, and the assistant looked at me and mouthed the word, "Run."

I managed to extricate myself from the dishes without making any noise and ran out of the bathroom, not noticed at all by the crazy spaced-out nurse. I found a new hallway that led to a large closet, and inside the closet was a whole lot of hanging lab coats. I couldn't see the back of the closet, so I kept pushing through and the lab coats gave way to winter jackets and I found myself suddenly breaking out of a very thick display of such coats in a clothing store at a shopping mall.

There were tables just beyond, possibly for a cafe in this same store (logic, what is this concept? we don't do logic in dreams). There were randomly dream created family members there who recognized me and greeted me only like it was any old day, not like I'd been locked away in the funny farm. They didn't know, and I myself wasn't even sure how I'd gotten locked up there now. While they asked me mundane questions I said something to the effect of, "Listen, I've just escaped from a mental asylum up there on the hill," and pointed off in the general direction of where the hospital was (you couldn't see it from inside the mall).

They were all like, "Yeah right, very cute ha ha," and I said, "No, I'm serious, and I'm not even sure that I'm really out of there at all." I had a bad feeling that I was still somewhere in the asylum while hallucinating what I was seeing now, or somehow had my "spirit" split between the places and maybe I could actually tell these people something useful before waking back up in the asylum. I just hoped I was still hidden somewhere instead of stuck in my room again. I remember one dark-haired guy who was a random family friend looking off in the general direction of the hospital, he was starting to be convinced there was more to this.

I don't remember the first parts clearly, but this was a really long dream. There were several characters stuck on an island that was having major volcanic activity by surprise. Something had happened to mess up the entire island's geographic ecosystem. Also, there was a factor involved with live dinosaurs being in the park on the island, although it was not until later that the term Jurassic Park was used in conversation. I think maybe in this plot that original concept had failed and somebody else later had tried to "do it right."

The characters that survived the lava and earthquakes managed to get a large black jeep or SUV type vehicle to a complex where they were hoping to find an option for safety or communication or the like. At some point I became a young woman character amongst the others, and there was another lady older than me, a man and a teenage guy, and a little girl of about eight and a boy of maybe five at the most. Their parents were already dead at this point.

In the complex, we were discovering things like rows and rows of empty cubicles and lab rooms that were completely empty of staff and had stuff strewn all over the place. Somebody found a dead body, so we were afraid that something like raptors were loose in the building. The older guy with us had a gun, but was low on bullets. By this time we were realizing that being stuck inside was a bad choice, but had a bad feeling we couldn't go backwards and had no real idea now how deep we were inside the building.

We came across this odd hallway where it branched at a cross-ways, and straight ahead past the intersection there was a thick glass pane set like a wall and we could see very dark hallways beyond. In the hallway to the left, there was a door set into the wall on its right where maybe that weird dark hallway could be accessed through whatever room was inside the door. I told the others to wait, and the kids were all "no don't go, it's too dangerous!" but I went carefully into the mystery room. I don't remember anything specific about it, except that it did lead into that dark hallway, close to the far side of the glass.

I remember feeling very exposed in that hall, and walking back towards the glass to investigate if anything might be worth seeing there, there was a sudden flash of quick, white light somewhere behind me, probably from the ceiling. It reminded me of the speeding cameras at intersections, but it also spooked me and the kids on the far side of the glass were yelling at me to get out of there.

I made it back into the connecting room without incident even though I feared something would get me in that dark hallway. There's a bit of confusion to the dream plot/logic here as I'm not sure if what I saw next was in that connecting room, or in another room near the main hallway intersection. Either way, in whatever room I was in now, I saw a lady with a black evening dress on that had no shoulders, and a bodice made to look a bit like two black flower petals covering her chest.

I think the two kids were in this room with me now, but none of us thought this person was actually here to help us, and she started pulling the top of the dress down. Somehow the older guys out in the hall knew about this, and wanted to see, but the kids and I couldn't get out of that room fast enough. I had a baaad feeling that what was under that dress wasn't human (I remember thinking evil vine-plant-like monster) and from the sounds of gunfire I was correct as we fled down the main hallway (having gone right this time from the original direction we arrived, or in other words, putting the glass-walled dark area to our left in passing).

The other lady in the group had decided to stick back with the dudes even though we told her to run, so it was just me and the two children as we turned a corner left and found two sets of glass double doors side-by-side that we realized could be closed and locked. This doorway would also put us into hallways connecting to the dark area, and the little girl was upset because she said she saw a ghost in the hall with me when the light had flashed earlier. I couldn't figure out what she meant by "ghost" and if she had seen it on the glass or actually in the hall with me, but we were running out of time. I'd rather face a mysterious "ghost" that hadn't killed me the first time (to the point that I hadn't even known it had existed) than get eaten by something.

I told her it would be okay, that we at least knew there was danger where we had been before, including the dinosaurs we still assumed were around somewhere, and we needed to lock the door. We had no idea if the others were even alive at that point, and if we sat around and waited we'd all die. So we started working on the doors, which was really messed up by dream logic and required being closed juuuust so in order for the locks to catch, and of course the doors didn't want to stay shut properly. Then when they did, the locks had turned from more simple rotating latches to something more like the plastic belt connectors you see sometimes on backpacks or amusement park ride seatbelts.

We had just gotten the doors properly locked when the man and the lady arrived on the far side. The teenage boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. They told us to open the doors, and he was being really mean about it, not really pleading but demanding it. I had a really off feeling about him (and I already did from the stupid "hot" lady episode), and if I opened the door for the chick who was stupid enough to hang out with him, I'd be letting him through too. He felt like a danger right now about as bad as the other stuff. At least it seemed he was out of bullets, so they didn't have any real option to get through the door.

As I was debating for a moment, he suddenly made a sort of "boo" face at us through the glass, including spreading the fingers out on his hands next to his face. I realized at that point that my impression was correct, even more so... we had no value to this man. I shook my head, said, "...sorry..." and took off with the kids.

As we ran quickly through darkened hallways and rooms that had absolutely nothing in them, I held the girl's hand and she had her little brother's. I told the girl to hold onto her brother's hand like their lives depended on it (which technically they did), and that if I had to I would hold both their hands but it seemed like I needed one free right now. I was using it to open doors at this point, and we were making fast progress even though we had no real idea where we were going. At this point it was mostly just knowing we were getting away from previous problems.

Suddenly one of the doors led us into a room crammed with office supplies and other junk, but more importantly, there were windows around the back-right and back walls. Daylight! There were desks along the back wall (also piled with stuff) but with enough room to climb up and open the windows. I opened one, and found that there was only a simple window screen between us and freedom. I could see that we could make it to the ground below, as we were on the second floor, but we were going to be okay! I was thrilled, and somehow could even tell that the surrounding area was relatively safe... that's right, it was raining. There was something about rain making the environment safe, I can't remember why. The dinosaurs were allergic to rainwater? Who knows.

In the meantime, suddenly a gust of wind blew what seemed like a whole bunch of mosquitoes into the room. The kids freaked out and told me to close the window, and in confusion I remembered the screens and then noticed that the lower half had much larger, almost artistically-placed holes in the screenwork. (I think the dream was just trying hard to fill a plot hole on the fly.) Then I noticed where the breeze was whipping stuff outside past the other windows, and that it looked a whole lot like tiny fluffy-ended flower or tree seedlings gusting around.

I told the kids this, that it wasn't bugs, and that held in the logic and vanished from being a dream element. At this point we were preparing to get the heck out of there, and thinking maybe there were a few things that could be scavenged from the room (like rain jackets or plastic trash bags to use as such) although we weren't going to take more than a moment or two. For some reason I had taken my shoes and socks off to get up onto the desk, or so now the dream decided. So I was fishing around in the junk on the floor for my shoes and started putting my socks back on.

The girl told me she thought I should bring the (possibly Pokémon?) cards with me, as she said she had a feeling they would be on the mantle in the new place we would get when we got free of this. Suddenly the plot element was added that I had been carrying (...how?? lol) a pillowcase with the cards as well as other regular playing cards and something similar. The entire thing was a bit on the heavy side, so I asked about the other cards, and she giggled and said they weren't necessary or entirely optional.

I said something in agreement to that, I can't remember what, and I think I was about to clear the bag out so there were only the cards cute lil' miss possibly-psychic wanted to see in the future home we were apparently going to share... which did seem right, I'd built up a connection with these kids during the adventure...

I am Riddick. I wake up, finding myself in a mental hospital. Ah. Yeah. Familiar, but I'm new here. I've just been drugged after a fight with a patient. My only thought now is "I want out" and it is not nighttime yet. But no nurses or orderlies, just me in the room. I am able to leave through the door (did I break it? I think it was unlocked) and walk quickly down a hall into a room I shouldn't be allowed into. Hell, I shouldn't be allowed out of my room without supervision. They'll be looking for me any second now. This new room is all white and not unlike looking through the inside of a bunch of subway train cabins connected together somehow and there are also large bits of semi-transparent sheet plastic hanging from things. I don't like this area, the way it feels; sense danger but can't see it. Another door, move on to the next room.

This room is bigger, much bigger and all white as well. Big-time feeling of imminent doom. Something coming? Climb up on something (thought this room was mostly empty but reached the ceiling somehow... large bookshelf?). Thin pipes running along ceiling, just enough space to grab them but they don't really go convenient places. Keep trying, out of options. Can't give up now. Able to move along ceiling some, and there are emergency sprinklers here and there. Monster released into room; minotaur perhaps. Too busy trying to unscrew bits of sprinklers. Success, water all over now, careful not to slip please... able to keep grip on pipes. Ceiling getting wet too and weak enough to pull chunks out of.

Drop the refuse on the floor, hanging there by one arm and still pulling layers down. Able to pull up into crawlspace between floors; very little room. Try to find weak spot above, know I need to keep moving even though safer now. Every second counts. Succeed in finding new place to yank flooring out of; work through it only to find large stable and exercise area for mean-ass bull. It doesn't notice me at first, or it smells me but is coming towards me slow enough I can duck quickly back in hole and move along crawlspace to rip up through the floor somewhere else.

Outside now, somehow, must have found the right spot and Kyra is here. Got out a different way? Yes, Kyra's been here for a while or something; doesn't occur to me this isn't really right. No time to catch up (though we do talk, maybe others trying to escape but don't seem to have made it?)... let's move. Thought everything was okay now but then spot a sniper on a complicated fire escape; guy is one of (female) slam boss's top dogs. Run like hell across trashed-out area, dive for cover past a building but one of the shots hits me... follow Kyra over barbed-wire fence, hurting bad and pretty much fall over other side. She's trying to talk to me, seems superficial words, but now trying to help me along. Here we go, another open area between buildings and beyond that is freedom, yes? I'm suddenly dressed in leather and metal straps, and she's wearing even less (looks like chains). She has a whip I think. We are congratulating each other on escaping, she's not helping me anymore, I'm walking fine. She goes over the wall or fence here first and I follow.

Now where the hell am I? War. Everywhere. I'm in the middle of very open ground and people are dying. Not my fight, but taking fire as the enemy notices me. They don't know which side I'm on. Are some of these involved in the mental hospital? I think one side is, but this is all something much bigger now. Not what the patients are supposed to see. (Duh?) Nobody can tell who I am or what my story is. I'm just a living target on a battlefield...

Dive into a hole in the ground barely big enough for cover but it will work. Beats getting shot. Then someone is looking in the hole. It is the "good guys," they are fighting the evil that owns the mental hospital (do they even know?). They are at first cautious knowing I might not trust them. But they point out, what choice do I have? My injuries are present again, or I am noticing them again now, or I got shot again, I don't know. There is a girl, important to the leader or someone high-up, his daughter maybe? She is assigned to take me to a tent in their camp to see to my wounds. Place reminds me of desert nomads in a movie or something.

I sit on a cot and she does her thing. Bandaged now... my arm? Side? Leg? Don't really know. Just know I feel better. Much better. Woman is hot, but I want out of here. Out of all of it. I leave through the back of the tent and she doesn't stop me. Seems to understand. But now, I'm not sure what to do. In return for their services they are expecting me to do something for them? Or give them information on the place I escaped from? Do they even know a mental hospital is involved in all this? I don't care, I'm not staying here.

I remember an airfield, and Allied troops were taking over the area, taking it away from Nazis. This was supposed to be a WWII setting but there were modern elements, like a lot of the Allied troops were American soldiers in modern uniforms with current weapons.

They were going to take over a house and I offered to help. I said, "I had a week of ROTC, I'll be fine." (Made that up in the dream, definitely not true lol.) They looked at me funny but let me go along anyways. I picked up a ball-point pen and figured I'd use it as a weapon. Yeah. Maybe Riddick could get away with that... I guess the dream logic was going with it for now, but I sure as heck wasn't Riddick...

The troops went through the house methodically and it appeared to be empty. In an area with a large stairwell near the front door, there was also a pit in the floor that went down to a basement or something. The troops weren't worried about it and decided to go secure other locations or guard the house. Which left me and one other person by the pit.

I decided to go down into it, using a rope suspended over it with wooden beams, almost like a well. It wasn't far to the bottom, and I realized there was a passage that went back further under the house, and there was light somewhere in there, and sounds. Nazi sounds. The whole area looked like the beginning of a mine, and I remember someone saying there was buried treasure or valuables somewhere under the house.

I pulled myself up the rope as fast as I could and started yelling for help... the other person had disappeared. Nobody arrived except the Nazis who had heard me yelling. They climbed up out of the hole as I ran off further into the house. The first one to chase me died, I still had the pen of d00m. That had to hurt. I grabbed his gun and holed up in a room that mostly just had a large bed in the middle, the doorway to the hall where the Nazis were approaching (on the far side of the bed), and behind and to the left of me was a small stairwell going down into a back area of the house.

Nazis kept trying to shoot me through the door, and I nailed every one of them. (There had apparently been a whole lot of them in that mine.) Sometimes they used rocket launchers which I somehow magically avoided... and then scavanged. Yay, free rocket launchers! They also tried grenades but I threw them right back out before they exploded. At least once I got shot full of lead by a lucky bad guy, but I thought, "No, that's not right," and the dream rewound and let me have a chance to do it right. I survived the day in this way, and what was left of the Nazis seemed to be discussing retreating...